What is a Flechette?

I might of spelled it wrong,I was watching NCIS and Ducky had a guy in the morgue with all these things stuck in him and he said he was 4ft away when the gun went off they were about 1 inch long black pointy things.

They are small steel darts.... about 1 inch long... i suppose they were to be used in shot gun loads. Cool in concept, and probably had a practical use, but i don't think you can get them in a "loaded" round.

Flechettes were created during Vietnam by a special weapons group within the army. One of the guys assigned to that group used to work for me, so he was very well versed on the subject of Flechette. He said they found them to be extremely effective, because they would easily penetrate body armor when fired from a shotgun, and vehicle armor when delivered as the payload from a high velocity rocket. Their small size allowed thousands of them to be packed into rocket payloads. He said they were never put into service because the brass was concerned that they would violate some treaty by being to destructive to the human body.

To answer your question about what they are, they are small steel darts with a shaft about the diameter of a pencil lead. They are ground to a point on one end and have 4 steel vanes molded on the opposite end. Total length of each dart is about 1 1/2" - 2". They look like a miniature arrow. They are currently sold in bulk by the pound to be hand loaded into shotgun shells. As Joncutt stated, you can buy them from Cheaper than Dirt.

I see these flechette rounds for shot guns, at the gun shows form time to time. I bought some once to see what they would do, and I was not impressed when shooting them into a piece of plywood. If you used them for SD you would most probably end up in jail.

After work by Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s there was a concept for Direct Injection Antipersonnel Chemical Biological Agent (DIACBA) where flechettes were grooved, hollow pointed, or otherwise milled to retain a quantity of chemical biological warfare agent to deliver through a ballistic wound.[1] The initial work was with VX, but found that it had to be thickened for the flechette to deliver a reliable dose. Eventually this was replaced by a particulate carbamate. The US Biological Program also had a microflechette to deliver either botulinum toxin A or saxitoxin, the M1 Biodart, which resembled a 7.62 mm rifle cartridge.

Yep, they are nasty. Supposedly would go against the Geneva Convention and were deemed inhumane to be used in Vietnam for that reason. Me, I think anyone that tortures our POWs or cuts off prisoners heads with swords, etc. deserves whatever weapon we can find to use against them. I would still be using them and napalm against whoever stepped across the line.